The epigraph to A Streetcar Named Desire is a stanza from Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower”: “And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind [I know not whither hurled] But not for long to hold each desperate choice.” These words, and with the poignant image they evoke, resonate enchantingly with a mood of unmitigated desolation, of both the protagonist and the locale, that pervades the play, which is now considered one of Tennessee Williams’s best, and indisputably his most well-known. Continuing his interest in the paralysing effect of misplaced hopes and dogged delusions, Streetcar repeated the success of The Glass Menagerie , by all accounts the play that catapulted Williams to fame, when it opened in Broadway in 1947. A cinematic version soon appeared in 1951, of which Elia Kazan, fresh from his critical success with the stage version, reprised his role as the director. The produc